Twitch Personality Spends 37 Straight Trying to Conquer <em>Tears of the Kingdom</em> With Only a Single Stick

One could think that two years post-launch since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom debuted, fans would have exhausted novel self-imposed challenges that apply special restrictions on a gameplay session. Yet, although numerous gamers have attempted to complete Tears of the Kingdom with just a stick, streamer PointCrow stands out as the player who aimed to beat the adventure with a single stick—meaning, the very same stick throughout.

PointCrow is famous for such difficult playthroughs, such as the time he played the title using only bombs or the effort where he aimed to beat the game with zero energy. A one-branch playthrough, however, sounds impossible at first glance. There's the opening sequence, which forces the hero to use the legendary blade. Additionally, there's the entire durability system, which is especially important when dealing with the weakest tool in the entire game. Yet if the stick shatters, that's the end. It's over.

So, How?

How did he do it? The simple answer is exploits. The full story, I kid you not, is parallel universes. It turns out, you can manipulate Tears of the Kingdom's saving mechanism to have distinct game sessions that impact one another. So PointCrow creates a “preparation” save where he advances standardly, and the real file, where he's limited. The setup save has him going through the prologue and first starting area, and this Link acquires maximum endurance and health. From here, he starts a cinematic and pauses partway through to instruct the software to load an automatic save from the branch-only file. The game gets mixed up and creates a third save file that merges the conditions of the original two.

That causes fresh problems, though. The fused file has a protagonist that never obtain the capability to access sacred places. Luckily, this is an issue that the file exploit addresses easily, but pulling it off means relying on an buggy build of the title that fails to load some locations. Like other obstacles, he has a technical workaround for it: He starts the game on its pre-release 1.0 build, and then updates the software partway through to ensure it starts working properly.

Overcoming Durability and Other Hurdles

Curiously, the prologue form of Link is programmed so that he is unable to break any weapons he wields, presumably to prevent a situation where the player gets trapped at the start of the adventure. But that's additionally how PointCrow gets around the wear issue, as the Link he pulls between dimensions is the one from the beginning of the game. It's a clever trick, but not one that eradicates all possible difficulty. The stick is still a weak weapon that renders battles tedious. But at that point, it's all a question of determination and perseverance. It further aids that there's a copying exploit that grants him an plentiful number of consumables to boost his attack, or stock up on healing spirits. He additionally makes use of a glitch that enables him to phase through the environment. Some would find these means reason to question the validity of the attempt, but to my view, he's a resourceful player who is ready to do whatever it takes to engage his viewer. He also uses a penalty of sorts stating that, for every fairy he uses, he'll remove a fan from his live stream, creating an motivation to avoid overly rely on them.

Boss Fights and the Final Encounter

The streamer manages to defeat many of the game's main enemies, but the battles appear grueling. The video edit of his journey spares the audience sit through the whole fights, which is a blessing when a few of them last several long hours. One boss fight, Queen Gibdo, takes an incredible twenty-three hours. The final villain battle, which erases Link's hearts as it progresses, is a memorable nail-biter. The unbreakable branch is after all only a stick. He is unable to necessarily clone objects during the fight.

So, is it possible? In a matter of speaking, he manages to defeat the dragon version of Ganon. But the software forces the player to use the legendary weapon as the last attack, so strictly speaking, it's not quite completely a stick-only playthrough. But where's the challenge in that?

When everything is said and done, the streamer banned more than 1,000 people in his live stream. RIP.